Budget 2019: This Village Shows All That Is Wrong With India’s Agriculture

In India, 34 farmers and farmhands kill themselves every day—at least they did in 2015 after which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stopped disclosing the count. There’s also a debate around what actually drove them to the extreme step. But there’s little doubt about what killed Jowregowda CV: despair.

He had borrowed Rs 5 lakh from banks and loan sharks to buy a cow and lease land for a small farm the size of football field in Karnataka’s Chikkade village, a three-hour drive southwest of India’s IT city of Bengaluru. For two years, there was almost no crop as the local dam had hardly any water, his wife Parvathi said. “I tried to help by stitching clothes, but we weren’t able to repay,” she said. “There was constant pressure from moneylenders. He couldn’t tolerate it.”

Parvathi found Jowregowda, 45, hanging in the bathroom outside their one-room house early in the morning of Nov. 30, 2017.

India faces a rural distress triggered by poor returns from agriculture, which employs more than half of nation’s workforce. It’s a culmination of falling prices, lack of irrigation and inability to sell outside government-controlled auction markets. None of these problems are new and can be partly blamed for farmer suicides. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, more than 12,600 such deaths were reported in 2015 alone—the last year for which the government published data. Nearly 60 percent of these were attributed to indebtedness, farming-related issues and poverty. The government has since not published the numbers. But the pace doesn’t appear to have slowed by much.

In 2016-17, Karnataka alone reported 1,034 farm suicides stemming from rural distress, the state agriculture minister had told the assembly. People in Chikkade, where farmers grow sugarcane and paddy, said more than 10 deaths have occurred in the past 12 months in their Pandavapura taluk, including two in the village.

It’s the fallout of a larger social crisis where the amount of land is constant but with each generation the number of people dependent on it increased, according to Narendra Pani, an economist and political analyst from the National Institute of Advanced Studies. “The fact is that the government cannot and doesn’t have the resources to solve the problem.”

The last agriculture census found that more than 85 percent of farm landholdings in India are less than 2 hectares—about the size of three football fields. Poor irrigation in large swathes of the nation means farmers predominantly rely on monsoons that water nearly two-thirds of India’s farmland. A bad year of summer rains brings down rural incomes and piles on debt. There’s no guarantee that a good one helps either.

‘Farming Gives Nothing’

Chikkade is located in the Pandavpura taluk of Mandya district, the sugarcane bowl of Karnataka. The hamlet has a population of about 2,500 people, mostly paddy and cane growers who depend on the Krishna Raja Sagara reservoir for irrigation.

There was sufficient rain last year after two successive years of shortfall in the region. It’s been a season of bumper harvest and cartloads of cane is a common sight on village roads.

But CD Nagendra, whose three-acre farm is just a kilometre away from Jowregowda’s, isn’t banking on just his crop. He works in the fields during the day and moonlights as a quality inspector at the local dairy cooperative for Rs 4,000 a month.

Farming gives nothing, “ella nastha (all for food),” he said in Kannada while chopping cane. “Only the middlemen make money.”

The state government promised to open 27 procurement centres but not even one has come up. “I have a Rs 45,000-loan and need money. I can’t wait for the centres to start,” said Nagendra, who’s forced to sell his produce at Rs 1,200 a quintal to a middleman against the minimum support price of Rs 1,700.

It’s a vicious cycle for farmers, according to Ganesh Prasad, faculty, planning and research at Abdul Nazeer Sab State Institute for Rural Development & Panchayat Raj in Mysuru. “A comprehensive failure of procurement facilities of the government,” he said over the phone. While some sugar factories have shut, there are a few which even owe the farmers with dues running in crores, he said.

Middlemen

Farmers don’t have a choice but to sell the crop through state-controlled auction markets called Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees. While the government fixes floor prices for nearly two-dozen crops, it has a meaningful impact only on staples which it buys in large quantities for state-run food welfare schemes. That invariably forces them to sell their produce at below the support prices to traders.

The government needs to provide an appropriate pricing infrastructure, Pramod Kumar, professor at Agriculture Development and Rural Transformation Centre, said. He cited the example of pomegranate where the middlemen grab the bulk of the profit. While farmers earn Rs 10-20 a kilogram, the fruit is sold in the market at Rs 80 a kg. “Unless the marketing system improves, they can’t move to the desired cropping pattern.”

Prime Minister Modi has started linking state-controlled auction houses online to provide a bigger market. Kumar isn’t optimistic. Farmers immediately sell their yield as they don’t have resources to store goods to trade in the mandis, he said. “The beneficiaries are still the traders.”

There are a plenty of schemes from crop insurance to support prices but, according to Prasad, implementation is where the government is failing.

Loan Waiver Quick Fix

An immediate response of governments has been loan waivers. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party pardoned loans in Uttar Pradesh after winning the state polls. Its rival Congress did that after wresting three heartland states from the BJP. In all, 10 states pardoned loans worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore in the last two years.

Even Karnataka announced one in July last year that is being implemented in phases. Those who defaulted on repayments up to Dec. 31, 2017 will get the money first—the state aims to waive loans of 17.32 lakh people in all. Farmers in Chikkade have filled forms and await money.

But that’s not a solution, said Pani, as it discriminates against those who have already paid the loan. And it doesn’t help the agriculture labour as large part of suicides happen among farmhands, he said.

Not to mention the financial implications that increases the fiscal gap.

Lack Of Awareness

Villagers in Chikkade have also seen soil fertility reduce because of fertiliser overuse. Channe Gowda, 65, said earlier he reaped 30 quintals of paddy an acre, but the yield has fallen to about 20-22 quintals due to overuse of fertilisers. “The land is becoming unfertile.”

And that makes them even more dependent on fertilisers when costs have gone up, according to Gowda. The price of fertiliser has increased from Rs 1,100 for a bag of 50 kg to Rs 1,300, he said.

Part of the problem lies in lack of awareness about crop rotation, fertilisers and seeds. The government’s focus on providing advice had led to India’s Green Revolution when the nation became self-sufficient. “That’s not happening at all now.”

Not just Karnataka, BloombergQuint found farmers face similar problems in Gujarat and Punjab. And as farm income falls, the rural economy bears the brunt.

CD Puttegowde, 55, the owner of the tea shop in the village, has seen his income go down. “Earlier, I used to make Rs 700-800 a day, but that has also come down to Rs 300-400,” he said. With farmers earning less, they aren’t buying much as well. He plans to sell a part of his nearly one-acre land to repay the loan he took last year to buy the stock for his shop and treating his wife’s medical treatment. “Anyways, there is no profit in farming.”

Jowregowda’s two teenage sons dropped out of school after their father’s death. Their mother wouldn’t let them take up farming. But the money the two make together is barely sufficient for the family, Pradeep, the older one who works at a pharmacy, said. “All we want is to ensure is that our mother doesn’t have to work.”